Fabric Easter Egg ATCs

These are my fabric Easter Egg ATCs for an ATC swap on my Fabric in Altered Art Yahoo group hosted by Sharon. The first 2 eggs were decorated with bobbin work. I made the middle one first, cut out the egg shape, and did the bobbin work. Since I was working from the wrong side it was hard to tell where to stop and start. On the one on the left I did the bobbin work on a square piece of fabric, then cut out the egg shape. The 3rd egg is made from ribbon. I printed the egg shape on a piece of lightweight cardstock, covered the shape with glue stick, and laid the pieces of ribbon across the egg shape. When the egg was covered and the glue stick was dry I cut the egg shape out. The easiest one for sure. They were all stitched to a piece of fabric with a decorative stitch, then cut to size and glued to the ATC sized cardstock. I covered the cardstock with fabric front and back and used a satin stitch to cover the edges. The little flowers are attached with a french knot in the center.

Vintage Babies

This is the page I did for Barb's Vintage Babies book for our fabric altered book round robin in my Fabric in Altered Arts Yahoo group. Barb had the pages with felt batting already cut. I added an eyelet fabric as my base and then the cream and floral print over it. Added some trim on the right hand side with the little heart, button and flower. I used the same fabric on the back and added part of the words to a lullaby with a piece of the border from the cream and floral fabric which had images of sleeping children. This weekend I am working on Hilery's Alice in Wonderland book for the same RR and Barb's Texture/Touch book for our new RR. I plan to add a lot of embroidery and bobbin work to a cream colored crazy quilt block. Wish me luck!

Last Wild West Fabric Book

Goodness, it's been a while. I am just about to get caught up and start having fun again. Taking a little trip always seems like a good idea at the time but catching up is a pain! This is my page for the last book I will work in for the Wild West Fabric Book RR on my FabricInAlteredArt group. Still love working with the western stuff. I saw the coolest altered cowboy boot that is in the current edition of Altered Arts magazine. I might have to give that a try.
Debbie had made denim pages for her book. I printed my image on a piece of muslin that was backed with a lightweight fusible. If you iron your muslin to a piece of wonder under and cut it to a size that will work with your printer you can print directly to the muslin. It takes a few minutes longer than the ink jet ready fabric sheets but it sure is a lot cheaper. It works really well with vintage themes or themes where you might want your image to have more of a worn look. I added a piece of lace, a few buttons and some heavy duty western themed alpha stickers. The back has the word COWGIRL with a suede look cowboy hat and a pocket with a leather looking tag. You can take a regular scrapbook tag or heavy card stock cut in a tag shape, crumple it up, ink it with a Tim Holtz distress pad, dampen it with a wet paper towel and smooth it out to dry. Or iron it dry. Then go over it with the distress ink pad again. It will have a nice leather look to it.

TAST Week 7 & 8

I will be out of town most of the week so I decided I better add the fly stitch to my block before I left. I had trouble getting the fly stitch even. Other than that I like it but I want to practice it a lot more. The feather stitch is right above it. That one was a little harder for me to get going on. It took several practice rows before I realized that if I just made use of those "imaginary lines" I kept reading about that it is a really simple stitch. I am starting a new CQ block next week for a class and I am going to do a lot more with the feather and fly stitch. I will probably go back and add something to the feather stitch on this block.

Best Friend

This is my February page for the Fabric in Altered Arts fabric page swap. I saw a quilt on Simply Quilts that was made up of blocks with a simple background and heart applique. On that quilt the background and the heart were a real mix of colors and themes. Very cool quilt. I wanted to do something similar and remembered my cute valentine dog fabric. The print on my fabric was so large that it was hard to get a whole dog and the text surrounding it into the size heart that I needed which was only about 5". The pages are only 6x6 so I just had to do the best I could. I had tried a different fabric (also dogs...lol) and had the same problem. I cut out the heart freehand and used a blanket stitch, raw edges, no turning. Need to learn how to do that. I added a few words using my machine and then filled in the blank spots with some decorative stitching. I realized about half way through the project that someone else in the group had also used a dog for her Valentine/February page. We are a bunch of dog lovers in that group! You can find my 2 doxies in the January archives.

TAST Week 6

I added a row of Eyelet stitches with a French Knot in the center and Cretan stitches to my CQ block this week. I had planned to add French Knots between the stitches as well but they were just too close together. They were both worked with perle cotton. I am really looking forward to adding the Feather stitch to this block. I am taking an online crazy quilt block class for the next several weeks so a lot more stitching to be done!

Flapper

This is a page I did in a fabric book with a Flappers theme. I just realized that I only scanned the back of the page. The black and green fabric was provided with the book. I have some old french postcards that I used for my flappers. I ink jet image is stitched to a piece of silk and then stitched to the fabric. I added the rose applique and feather along with the pink bead trim on the outside edge of the page but still need something else. I have until tomorrow to figure it out.